Change the GOP should believe in

It was a mere four years ago that the Republican Party governed — and I assure you I employ the word "govern" reluctantly — every level of federal government. Few experts construed this to mean that the Democratic Party was forever irrelevant or a rotting cadaver.

What were the future apparatchiks up to as Republicans were busy breaking every promise, crime and piggy bank they could get their paws on?

Well, they did what any enlightened individual should do: They found themselves. They started blogging. Getting angry. Raising money. Marching. Caring. They began purging imposters and crafting catchy platitudes that the non-ideological voter could digest.

Today, a comparable, spontaneous grassroots effort has materialized. This one celebrates free-market principles rather than statism. Not surprisingly, there is also a sudden shift in perception. The once-glorified citizen activist is now nothing more than a radical, slack- jawed, proletariat yokel.

The Tea Parties are ridiculed, their participants demeaned and falsely portrayed as venomous radicals. As we all know by now, deniers of hope and change, by definition, are extremists.

Hey, times change. You have to grow up. Now that longtime liberal Sen. Arlen Specter has defected from the Republican Party, lots of smart people are imploring conservatives to stop scaring away innocent moderates.

It's funny, because in 2006, when Democrats purged Joe Lieberman for his traitorous position on a single issue, few know-it-all Beltway types scolded the Democratic Party for its ideological rigidity, fewer moaned about the shrinking size of the tent and fewer still demanded that Dems be more reasonable and conform with the ruling party in the White House.

Yet Specter, rather than admit that the only way he can win an election is as a Democrat, has perpetuated the following mythical narrative:

"Since my election in 1980, as part of the Reagan Big Tent," the Democrat-turned-Republican-turned-Democrat explained, "the Republican Party has moved far to the right." (All of a sudden Ronald Reagan provided a big tent? Who knew?)

Now, it is true that fiscally conservative ideas are as popular with voters as they are with Specter . . . but a lurch to the right? Not on economics. There was no greater friend to expansion of government than President George W. Bush. I know this because anytime I mention the massive debt and regulation that Obama has already saddled us with, a helpful Democrat will appropriately point out that Bush started it. Which, apparently, makes it all tolerable.

As the left continues to lecture conservatives about their political future — because, after all, Dems have been fully in charge for 100 days now — let's recount a couple of facts: The Iraq war was supported by more than 60 percent of Americans. Polls showed wide-ranging support for the Patriot Act. Jimmy Carter was once president.

It's possible that voters who opposed a "stimulus" plan that only stimulated the colossal growth of government will not be the extremists tomorrow. It's possible that citizens who protest against the nationalization of the auto and banking industries may one day be proven right. Who knows? Those nutty protesters with their crazy opposition to the socialization of health care and energy policy may one day look prescient.

Granted, principles won't win you elections (just ask Specter). You need big tents — and cliches about big tents. But if you don't have a cause or purpose, what's the point of winning, anyway?

I have read and reread the last paragraph of this article and I confess I do not understand the author's point. Which is it? Do we need inclusion or principle? I have come down heavily on the side of principle because the "big tent" scenario simply does not work on a practical level. People will not come into your tent no matter how big it is and how welcoming you might be to any bizarre political philosophy if you cannot attract them with compelling core principles. Here is a portion of a post which I published immediately after the election in response to a Politico article calling for Republicans and conservatives to move left to fill the big tent:

As we conservatives drag the remnants of our movement into the wilderness with no idea how we will emerge or whether we will ever emerge as an electoral force in America which is recognizable by my generation, we must inevitably engage ourselves in the most soul- searing inquiry of what went wrong. This will be an agony but equally it will be effective only to the degree that it hurts. It will not succeed without bloodshed. There must be finger-pointing and bloodletting. We must carve to the bone. The process must be Darwinian. Those whose ideas are false must be bayoneted on the trail.

The object is to find our soul - nothing less. In a come to Jesus sense we must get absolutely clear what it means to be a conservative. Only at this point do we look to the tent flaps and open them. Those who cannot subscribe to the hard-won consensus, to a confession of faith as to what is a conservative, should walk out through that flap. Those who are attracted from the outside to the core message of conservatism should be encouraged to walk through the flap and enlarge the tent. What the left wants us to do is to expand the census in the tent prematurely and thus turn a movement into a menagerie. The Soul-searching must be conducted by conservatives without the earnest ministrations from liberals like those of Politico. This article, of course, has nothing whatever to do with explaining why Republicans lost 2008 election across the board, it has everything to do with first efforts by the left to sabotage the rebuilding process on the right which must be done exclusively by the right.

We have not lost the 2008 election because we were excessively partisan while Obama was enlightened and transcendental. We actually lost the election because George Bush and Karl Rove betrayed the soul of conservatism. A party without its soul is like an army which does not believe in itself, it cannot win the next contest. A party which had abandoned its principles and so lost the last two elections and frittered away both its power as the ruling coalition and its status as the majority philosophy of the nation, cannot expect to swell its ranks by recruiting to a lost cause. The party must first know what the cause is and only then can it recruit. To again borrow the military analogy, a party like an army disintegrates without a mission. Armies are assigned missions but a political party finds its mission only through soul-searching.

As this process occurs we will be told by the left that only a big tent party can win and that to become a big tent one must move to co-opt the center. That is not how it works. That is the reverse of the way it works. The center is not peopled by voters with fixed notions about the exercise of power who wait for one of the great political parties to surrender their values and embrace the tempered and resolute opinions of the middle. That happens with splinter parties but not with the mushy middle. When an unaffiliated voter bestirs himself to enter the polling booth he is confronted with one of two options: right or left. He does not consider who has moved the farthest geographically from right to the left or left to right any more than he commits because of his own long held political beliefs. He votes for the fella who best tickles his fancy at the moment. Put more charitably, he votes for the candidate who persuades that he is the best, and has the best to offer.

If we as conservatives do not believe that we have the best to offer we should get out of the business. A candidate, like a party, who is centered on his philosophy has integrity and is persuasive. And that philosophy must first have a vertical spiritual component which finds expression and out working in a horizontal governing philosophy.

Because of his race, Obama was asked only to demonstrate that he could walk and talk like a president. Obama has won the middle, not because he pandered to them, which he did, but because he had the wind at his back.

As John McCain reverts from titular head of the Republican Party to United States Senator, it falls to the rest of us to contrive a governing philosophy which he, unfortunately, did not own and therefore could not bequeath to us. We had such a legacy from Ronald Reagan but we squandered it. We must construct our own. We must do it in the wilderness. We must do it unaided by intermeddling liberals. Their's is the serpent's way, the easy way, a pander to the superficially popular, the accommodation to the middle. The bed of birth has always been a bed of pain. The pain must be embraced if we are to receive a new life.

"Granted, principles won't win you elections (just ask Specter). You need big tents — and cliches about big tents. But if you don't have a cause or purpose, what's the point of winning, anyway?"

I have read and reread the last paragraph of this article and I confess I do not understand the author's point. Which is it? Do we need inclusion or principle?

IMHO, he's basiclly saying Scottish Law Arlen didn't have many principles, and while you can open the tent, don't give your base the middle finger.

The left and some moderates along with the drive by media like to the demonize social conservatives, especially the religious right for a number of reasons, e.g. not believing in evolution, gay rights, embryonic stem cell research, etc.

What the GOP needs to do is return the favor, i.e. demonize the marxists. This isn't mommy's and daddy's democratic party. That started to die in 1968. The marxists are in complete control now. How do you work across the aisle with marxists? They own the economy now, and they want to do more damage to it.

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